Engineering & Technology Activities for Kids

I spent the 9 years following my high school graduation studying to become an engineer. This is actually pretty surprising given that when I graduated from high school, I had no idea what an engineer did.

Now I know that an engineer is someone who solves problems. Engineering and technology development require recognizing an area of life that can be improved and using your vast store of knowledge and understanding of math and science to find and implement a solution.

Engineers need to be creative and be able to approach problems from a variety of unique directions. They need to be prepared to fail and prepared to try again if something doesn’t work the first time.

My kids may not become engineers. However, I hope that as they grow into adults, they understand and appreciate the value of approaching a problem like an engineer.

Even though I’m trained as a mechanical engineer, before I left my full-time research scientist position to stay home with my kids, I spent most of my days as a computer programmer. Computer science and engineering are obviously fields which will only become more and more important as time goes on.

There is so much that one can do with a bit of electrical engineering knowledge. Putting together simple circuits is not only fun, but can be really useful as well.

As I homeschool my kids, robotics is one of the areas I’m most excited about. In school, I never actually built even a simple robot. However, I’m confident that this is exactly the sort of thing I can figure out.